Category Archives: Computer Stuff

I got myself a new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B this morning. I was intrigued by its quad-core cpu and how it would stack up against the other single board computers that I’ve benchmarked in the past, which were:

I recently got a MIPS Creator CI20 from the guys at Imagination to play with. So here’s a quick of my first impressions, including a few benchmarks with sysbench. Performance overall was quite good compared to a Raspberry Pi 1 model B+, and even was pretty good compared to an Intel Edison on the CPU benchmark. Continue reading »

The Raspberry Pi foundation announced it’s latest member of the Raspberry Pi family, the Model A+. This is a departure from the usual credit card form factor, in that they’ve managed to knock off 20mm from the length, resulting in a very nice 65x56mm form factor.

I’ve been working on camera hacks for a couple of year now. It started with the CameraPi, which was a Raspberry Pi mini-computer stuffed into an old battery grip for my Canon 5D Mark II Camera. Then came various variants on that, including a DIY time-lapse rail, the results you can see in the time-lapse section of this website. Theres’ also some water droplet photography, automated focus stacking, and even a bark activated door opener, not to mention the PiPhone.

Recently I took delivery of an Intel Edison with a Mini-Breakout Board. I was awestruck by the size of the thing, but it was not until I started using it properly for a couple of projects that I noticed that it seemed a little bit ‘snappier’ than boards I’d used in the past (Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone Black). So I decided to do a little benchmarking.

Here’s my latest DIY project, a smartphone based on a Raspberry Pi. It’s called – wait for it – the PiPhone. It makes use an Adafruit touchscreen interface and a Sim900 GSM/GPRS module to make phone calls. It’s more of a proof of concept to see what could be done with a relatively small form factor with off-the-shelf (cheap) components. I don’t expect everyone to be rushing out to build this one, but I had great fun in doing it, as it builds quite nicely on my previous projects, especially the Lapse Pi, a touchscreen time-lapse controller, and uses most of the same hardware.

So here’s my latest Raspberry Pi project. It uses the PiTFT Mini Kit, which is a 320×240 2.8″ TFT display and Touchscreen from Adafruit Industries that fits neatly onto my Raspberry Pi, to control a user interface to drive the back-end time-lapse script I showed you in a previous blog article.